From NASA JPL, signs that “the boy” isn’t leaving. Perhaps he’s receiving too warm a welcome.
El Niño 2009-2010 just keeps hanging in there. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/European Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during late-January through February has triggered yet another strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave. Now in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, this warm wave appears as the large area of higher-than-normal sea surface heights (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures) between 150 degrees west and 100 degrees west longitude. A series of similar, weaker events that began in June 2009 initially triggered and has sustained the present El Niño condition.
JPL oceanographer Bill Patzert says it’s too soon to know for sure, but he would not be surprised if this latest and largest Kelvin wave is the “last hurrah” for this long-lasting El Niño.
Patzert explained, “Since June 2009, this El Niño has waxed and waned, impacting many global weather events. I, and many other scientists, expect the current El Niño to leave the stage sometime soon. What comes next is not yet clear, but a return to El Niño’s dry sibling, La Niña, is certainly a possibility, though by no means a certainty. We’ll be monitoring conditions closely over the coming weeks and months.”
An El Niño also causes unusual changes in atmospheric circulation and convection around the globe. JPL’s Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft captured a large eastward shift of deep convection from the current El Niño, indicated by large amounts of cloud ice in the upper troposphere.
NASA’s Aura Sees El Niño’s Effects on the Atmosphere
An El Niño is characterized by an abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean. This sea surface temperature change is accompanied by anomalous atmospheric circulation and convection changes around the globe. The 2010 El Niño reached maximum strength during January and February 2010. The Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft observed a clear eastward shift of deep convection, indicated by large amounts of cloud ice in the upper troposphere. The enhancement of cloud ice from 13 kilometers (approximately 40,000 feet) and above is the greatest since Aura launched in July 2004.
On July 15, 2004, NASA’s Aura spacecraft launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on a mission to study Earth’s ozone layer, air quality and climate. Aura’s data are helping scientists address global climate change issues such as global warming; the global transport, distribution and chemistry of polluted air; and ozone depletion in the stratosphere, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere that extends from roughly 15 to 50 kilometers (10 to 30 miles) in altitude.
Aura is the third and final major Earth Observing System satellite. Aura carries four instruments: the Ozone Monitoring Instrument, built by the Netherlands and Finland in collaboration with NASA; the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder, built by the United Kingdom and the United States; and the Microwave Limb Sounder and Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer, both built by JPL. Aura is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The Microwave Limb Sounder is a second-generation instrument that is helping scientists improve our understanding of ozone in Earth’s stratosphere, especially how it is depleted by processes of chlorine chemistry. The instrument measures naturally occurring microwave thermal emission from the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to remotely sense vertical profiles of atmospheric gases, temperature, pressure and cloud ice.
For more information on Aura on the Internet, visit http://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/.
For more information on the Microwave Limb Sounder on the Internet, visit: http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/.
- An El Niño is characterized by an abnormal warming of sea surface temperatures in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean. This sea surface temperature change is accompanied by anomalous atmospheric circulation and convection changes around the globe. The 2010 El Niño reached maximum strength during January and February 2010. The Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft observed a clear eastward shift of deep convection, indicated by large amounts of cloud ice in the upper troposphere. The enhancement of cloud ice from 13 kilometers (approximately 40,000 feet) and above is the greatest since Aura launched in July 2004.
On July 15, 2004, NASA’s Aura spacecraft launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on a mission to study Earth’s ozone layer, air quality and climate. Aura’s data are helping scientists address global climate change issues such as global warming; the global transport, distribution and chemistry of polluted air; and ozone depletion in the stratosphere, the layer of Earth’s atmosphere that extends from roughly 15 to 50 kilometers (10 to 30 miles) in altitude.
Aura is the third and final major Earth Observing System satellite. Aura carries four instruments: the Ozone Monitoring Instrument, built by the Netherlands and Finland in collaboration with NASA; the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder, built by the United Kingdom and the United States; and the Microwave Limb Sounder and Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer, both built by JPL. Aura is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
The Microwave Limb Sounder is a second-generation instrument that is helping scientists improve our understanding of ozone in Earth’s stratosphere, especially how it is depleted by processes of chlorine chemistry. The instrument measures naturally occurring microwave thermal emission from the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to remotely sense vertical profiles of atmospheric gases, temperature, pressure and cloud ice.
For more information on Aura on the Internet, visit http://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/. For more information on the Microwave Limb Sounder on the Internet, visit: http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/.
This is more or less OT, but of considerable interest … and really related.
Popular Science has 137 years of their magazine in an online archive.
http://www.popsci.com/archives
Type in “climate” and look at some old articles. October 1906 is of interest.
You can likely think of more climate-related keywords.
Clive
Jim Clarke (14:08:38) : You wrote, “Ultimately, I believe the PDO is the largest factor.”
Here are links to three papers that say the PDO lags ENSO, making the PDO an aftereffect of El Nino and La Nina events.
Zhang et al (1997):
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/zwb1997.pdf
Newman et al (2003):
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/gilbert.p.compo/Newmanetal2003.pdf
Shakun and Shaman (2009):
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009GL040313.pdf
I discussed the misunderstandings about the PDO in a post that also ran here at WUWT:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/04/misunderstandings-about-pdo-revised.html
1. Examining the climatic record in accordance with the Galactic travels of the earth paint the recent Multidecadal Temperature changes of the Pacific Ocean as being very erratic and thus symptomatic of a Galactic cold signal.
2. It is a travesty that modern surface temperature records have become political tools that devalue their weather forecasting utility. The curious can find plentiful evidence supporting the conclusion that the most recent warm PDO obscured the ongoing trend to cold. If so there is every reason to expect that we should expect global temperatures to exceed the cold variance recorded as the peak of the 1940s -70s cold PDO/ cold AMO because the cold trends will flip the Atlantic’s Multidecadal Oscillation much sooner than previously recorded trends (those watching..KNOW that water temperatures in the Atlantic are definitely signaling a capacity for a quick turn).
3. I interpret the temperature analysis work of Spencer and Christy to be an excellent marker of (a) the changes to Earth’s Radiative Budget (1) higher tropospheric temperatures are an indicator of greater irradiative forcing
(b) the water vapor/ precipitation/ cloud cover potentials of the atmosphere that are all equal to the atmosphere’s capacity to cool the earth through the processes of determining the earth’s radiative budget.
Jimmy Haigh (14:41:58) : We’ve just experienced a pretty cold winter in the Northern hemisphere
Some places in the N. H. may have been cold but not all. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest it has not been either cold or wet. The snow pack and the reservoirs are below that desired by the local east-of-the-Cascade-slope irrigators. This seems to be about normal for a reasonably strong El Nino fall and winter season.
The not-so-cold winter is graphically shown here:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/climate/temp_graphs.php?stn=KYKM&submit=Change+Station&wfo=pdt
Between Nov. 27, 2009 and Jan. 20, 2010 I drove between Ellensburg and Yakima everyday- some days twice, and missed three days. I had several days of fog and 1 day of nasty snowy weather — the other 50 days didn’t resemble a good winter. There was a week of cold in early December.
1. Examining the climatic record in accordance with the Galactic travels of the earth paint the recent Multidecadal Temperature changes of the Pacific Ocean as being very erratic and thus symptomatic of a Galactic cold signal.
2. It is a travesty that modern surface temperature records have become political tools that devalue their weather forecasting utility. The curious can find plentiful evidence supporting the conclusion that the most recent warm PDO obscured the ongoing trend to cold. If so there is every reason to expect that global temperatures to quickly exceed the cold variances recorded as the peak of the 1940s -70s cold PDO/ cold AMO because the cold trends will flip the Atlantic’s Multidecadal Oscillation much sooner than previously recorded trends (those watching..KNOW that water temperatures in the Atlantic are definitely signaling a capacity for a quick turn).
3. I interpret the temperature analysis work of Spencer and Christy to be an excellent marker of (a) the changes to Earth’s Radiative Budget (1) higher tropospheric temperatures are an indicator of greater irradiative forcing
(b) the water vapor/ precipitation/ cloud cover potentials of the atmosphere that are all equal to the atmosphere’s capacity to cool the earth through the processes of determining the earth’s radiative budget.
Smokey,
Do you know how to save or print these articles other than do screen captures? (That is easy to do, but a PITA. )
Thanks,
Clive
David Alan Evans (18:32:11) :
R. Gates.
You adhere to the UAH measurements, I commend you.
For January and February of this year there is a reason why someone who advocates manmade global warming would stick to UAH. But in a few months that reason will be plunging down.
NORMAN, Okla. — A powerful storm began blowing through Oklahoma and the southern Plains on the first day of spring Saturday, bringing heavy snow and strong winds a day after temperatures reached into the 70s.
John F. Hultquist (19:13:38) :
Wasn’t too bad here in the mid-Pacific Northwest.
Shasta Res. is filling up, and the Trinity Alps look like somebody poured a giant bowl of ice cream on them. Snow levels stayed around 5,000′ most of the winter. Percip. about normal. December freeze caught most looking.
(clarifying-emending- the thought experiment)
Examining the climatic record in accordance with the Galactic travels of the earth paint the recent Multi-decadal Temperature changes of the Pacific Ocean as being very erratic and thus symptomatic of a Galactic cold signal.
2. It is a travesty that modern surface temperature records have become political tools that devalue their weather forecasting utility. The curious can find plentiful evidence supporting the conclusion that the most recent warm PDO obscured the ongoing trend to cold. If so there is every reason to expect global temperatures to quickly exceed the cold variances recorded as the peak of the 1940s -70s cold PDO/ cold AMO because the ERBE cold trends will flip the Atlantic’s Multidecadal Oscillation much sooner than previously recorded events (those watching..KNOW that water temperatures in the Atlantic are definitely signaling a capacity for a quick turn).
3. On ERBE: I interpret the temperature analysis work of Spencer and Christy to be an excellent marker of (a) the changes to Earth’s Radiative Budget (1) higher tropospheric temperatures are an indicator of greater radiative forcing
(b) the water vapor/ precipitation/ cloud cover potentials of the atmosphere summate the atmosphere’s capacity to cool the earth through the processes determining the earth’s radiative budget.
(c) As a response to the increasing gravitational effect had by the sun as an entailment of it retaining more energy during low sunspot cycles (heavier chemical makeup of its core and energy conveyors), High Latitude Volcanic activity increases the density potential of the magnetosphere thereby increasing radiative forcing and the temperature of the stratosphere. To accomplish similar effect, mid and lower latitude volcanic eruptions must (a) be more numerous and frequent (b) be of proportionately greater magnitude
Without going in to detail for those smart enough to have figure it out, understand why the Carrington Event is only a reflex action potential occurrence and why its in process modern sunspot maximum was a joke.
rbateman (19:58:35) :
You are correct. I generalized too much. I haven’t really mapped the pattern for this winter so I should not have suggested all of the PNW was less stormy than normal – just that the major storms mostly tracked south of the State of Washington and that was expected and is expected to continue. East-slope Cascade reservoirs in WA could use some of that water and snow you are talking about.
Some generalized information is here:
http://cses.washington.edu/cig/fpt/cloutlook.shtml
Specific snow information is here:
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/Washington/washington.html
Clive (18:58:42) :
This is more or less OT, but of considerable interest … and really related.
Popular Science has 137 years of their magazine in an online archive.
http://www.popsci.com/archives
Type in “climate” and look at some old articles. October 1906 is of interest.
You can likely think of more climate-related keywords.
Clive
———
Hey, thanks!! “Build your own ruby laser,” 1964 Popular Science!! I must have read that a million times when I first had it!
Amino Acids in Meteorites said (to Bob Tisdale)
“I don’t think R. Gates will understand you.”
Actually, not only do I understand Bob, I happen to think he’s a pretty darn smart guy…but thanks for your vote of confidence!
Having said that though, nothing Bob has written or said has changed my position of being 75% convinced that AGWT is likely correct, and a 25% skeptic. Bob, like many other AGW skeptics has many interesting ideas, and certainly knows a great deal about climate. But there are many billiant people on other side with exceptional credentials as well, and were in not for people like Bob, I might be true believer in AGWT. So I appreciate the points he and other knowledgable AGW skeptics raise. It make me go back and check and double check my assumptions, and pepper my climate research friends with endless questions. Sometimes (okay, most of the time) their answers are way over my head, but generally I’ve studied enough to get the general drift.
So in short, to reply to your statement that R. Gates will not understand what Bob T. has to say– well, yep, I get it, at least most of it, and even agree with some of it, but the devil is indeed in the details in AGWT, and El Nino is one of those details that is still fairly poorly understood overall. The overall process in known, but the causes of that process, the triggers, the interactions, the “teleconnections” with other events are still not well understood.
My essential point about the current El Nino, which despite latency issues, and that it is not a linear process, remains unchanged, and not fully answered by AGW skeptics– if this year’s El Nino is not as severe as 1998, but 2010 turns out to be the warmest year on instrument record, then why? One reasonable and simple answer from a believer in AGWT would be: because less heat is able to escape during this El Nino because more heat is being absorbed and re-emitted in the troposphere because of the higher GH gases present now than in 1998. Furthermore, AGWT would say that future El Nino years will also have a high degree of probability of being record warm years for the same reason, and because of the linkages between the atmosphere and ocean and potential AGW and stronger El Ninos, it is worth watching El Ninos to see if they display some change in their length and intensity, though this will take decades of study.
Brian G Valentine (15:11:28) :
I used to welcome El Nino events because the have a good influence on fishery in the Atlantic, but I have come to dread them – because, they allow for such nonsense as
“2009: The HOTTEST year in (exaggerated number) of YEARS!!!”
It is sure to follow, that this “extended” El Nino will be called the “worst” El Nino “ever” and all the result of “climate change”
———–
Good news.
2009 wasn’t that hot. 2007 was hotter, and 2005 hotter still: 2002 was just as hot as 2009, as was 1998.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
As for the El Nino, it is weaker than the 1998 one:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
(page 22 of 38 shows the ONI number, Oceanic Nino Index – 1973, 1983 and 1998 are all larger).
If 2010 becomes the new “hottest year ever” it won’t be because of this El Nino.
R. Gates: You wrote in part, “…AGWT would say that future El Nino years will also have a high degree of probability of being record warm years for the same reason, and because of the linkages between the atmosphere and ocean and potential AGW and stronger El Ninos…”
El Nino events aren’t getting stronger.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/el-nino-events-are-not-getting-stronger.html
Also, there is nothing to indicate that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have any impact on Ocean Heat Content. Refer to:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/09/enso-dominates-nodc-ocean-heat-content.html
And:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/north-atlantic-ocean-heat-content-0-700.html
And:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/north-pacific-ocean-heat-content-shift.html
andy adkins (21:27:25) : You wrote, “The curious can find plentiful evidence supporting the conclusion that the most recent warm PDO obscured the ongoing trend to cold.”
How would it do this? The PDO does not represent the SST anomalies of the North Pacific (North of 20N).
http://i43.tinypic.com/29fp8ad.jpg
The PDO does not even represent the difference between North Pacific SST anomalies and Global temperature anomalies:
http://i42.tinypic.com/345kgsk.jpg
And the PDO does not represent detrended North Pacific SST anomalies (like detrended North Atlantic SST anomalies represent the AMO):
http://i42.tinypic.com/17pev8.jpg
The PDO only represents the pattern of the SST anomalies:
http://i39.tinypic.com/20v1934.jpg
I discussed this in a post that also ran here at WUWT:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/04/misunderstandings-about-pdo-revised.html
R. Gates (23:12:32): You wrote in part, “even agree with some of it,” with respect to my earlier comment and the post linked to it.
What don’t you agree with? The ENSO-induced shifts in the temperature anomaly data exist. I haven’t manufactured them. I’ve just broken the global temperature data down into subsets to make those shifts visible.
There is multiplicity of secondary currents in the Pacific equatorial region.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Ocean_currents_1943_(borderless)3.png
Since El Nino is generated in the area, there is remote possibility that there may be relationship between El Nino strength (related to its longitudinal extent) and the geomagnetic field. This chart shows that that may be indeed the case.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC19.htm
Bob Tisdale (00:49:46) :
Also, there is nothing to indicate that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have any impact on Ocean Heat Content. Refer to:
link And link And link:
——————
There is evidence that anthropogenic greenhouse gases put 94.4% of their global warming heat into the oceans:
An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950 (Murphy 2009) showed that 94.4% of the global warming heat goes into the oceans (the rest into the land and atmosphere). If the ocean is absorbing 0.77 ± 0.11 Wm−2, this puts the total energy imbalance at around 0.82 ± 0.12 Wm−2. This is a slight underestimate as Murphy 2009 included ocean heat down to 3000m, not 2000m.
Earth’s Global Energy Budget (Trenberth 2009) examined satellite measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation for the March 2000 to May 2004 period and found the planet accumulating energy at a rate of 0.9 ± 0.15 Wm−2.
You look at only the upper 700 meters of the entire ocean.
The deepest part of the ocean, the Marianas Trench, goes down 10,900 meters.
The top 700 meters of ocean heat content is a lot more variable than the top 2000 meters, which shows a steady absorption of energy at the rate of 0.77 ± 0.11 Wm−2 for the years 2003 to 2008, inclusive (a time period when the upper 700 meters seems to halt its warming).
The important point is that Argo floats now allow us to look at the ocean heat content down to 2000 meter depths, not the 700 meters you are concentrating on:
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/FrHow_Argo_floats.html
At this depth, there has been no stalling of the heat content rise, such as the 700 meter top of the ocean from 2004 to 2009:
http://tinyurl.com/yeurhn3
Global ocean heat storage is definitely rising, in the top 2000 meters of the ocean, during this time.
This graph is based on data from Schuckmann 2009, and a free pre-print version of that paper is here:
http://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
From the paper:
5. Conclusion
During the six years of in-situ measurements [2003-2008], an oceanic warming of 0.77 ± 0.11 Wm−2 occurred in the upper 2000m depth of the water column.
Major advances in measuring the global ocean hydrographic changes have been made by the implementation of the Argo observing system
In addition to the rates of global hydrographic changes, the large-scale spatial patterns of temperature and salinity variability have been estimated. With our finndings it is possible to classify time scales of variability within different latitude bands, at least over the period of our in-situ field. These show large amounts of interannual and decadal fluctuations at northern mid-latitudes which reach deep into the water column.
And from the Introduction:
In addition, the long-term global warming trend is also largly caused by warming in the Southern Ocean that extends deep into the water column
It is hard to see the warming “deep into the water column” if you are not measuring there – 0 m to 700m measurements are not looking at 700m to 2000m ocean heat.
If the Argo network were more numerous and the floats went deeper, we would have an even better understanding of where all the extra heat from global warming is going – the vertical flows, the ocean currents involved and their oscillations, how deep the warming is penetrating, etc. But Argo is definitely a good start.
In a recent interview, the “Ultimate Weatherman,” Ken Ring he said that the El Nino will be extended in duration due to lunar influences. Ken’s spectacularly accurate weather forecasts use historical patterns based on tidal air movements caused by lunar passage and variability in distance from Earth.
Interview Here:
http://bit.ly/a3PYTP
Those are using the “meteorological year” figures of Dec thru Nov. — the calendar year figures show 2009 as being higher up on the warm scale. Here are the figures of those two categories, met-year to the right:
1998: 56 57
2002: 56 57
2005: 62 61
2007: 57 59
2009: 57 56
Only one calendar year was warmer than 2009, 2005.
rogerkni (09:41:12) :
Only one calendar year was warmer than 2009, 2005.
————
OK, quite right -I prefer calendar years anyway.
2009 was tied with 2007, and slightly warmer than 2002 and 1998, and warmer still than 2003 and 2006. And it made 2008 seem almost as cold as 1997.
I guess it was pretty warm.
Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.
— Homer Simpson
Neven (09:17:43) :
What I would like to know: Will the next moderate El Niño cause the UAH dataset to break monthly anomaly records again? The sun is bound to be more active in a year or two, three.
——————–
UAH isn’t the only organization analyzing NASA satellite measurements of global (well, -82.5 deg. latitude to 82.5 deg. latitude, not quite global) temperatures – don’t forget RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) and UW (University of Washington).
Some say UAH has made many errors over the years, and is not as trustworthy as RSS – and UW corrects them both for lower stratosphere contributions:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/msu.html
Bob T,
Your contention that El Ninos have not grown stronger in the past few decades is partially backed up by looking at El Ninos prior to 1900, in so-called “Super El Nino events”. What is the source of your pre-1900 data, how has it been checked and verified? All my reading of the research puts very little credibility in any data prior to 1900, and really, prior to about 1914. What is the source of your pre-1900 data that makes you so certain that the past few decades of strong El Ninos is nothing unusual?
Also, please address the issue of the so-called 1976/77 “climate shift” related to both ENSO and the PDO. I’d be very curious to get your current take on this event (or non-event) as the case may be….